NATO Transformation

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has been the most important and successful alliance of all time, but today faces many challenges; search for relevancy with the end of the cold war, growing military capabilities gap compared to the US, requirements of the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), new Bush doctrine of preemption, expansion of NATO members, and creation of the NATO Response Force (NRF). Meeting these challenges has been made more difficult by the friction created by the war in Iraq and the division between the NATO allies. During the Prague summit in November of 2002, NATO invited 7 new countries to join the alliance, and laid out plans for transforming. This transformation is aimed at giving the alliance the capability (forces, command and control structure) to be relevant, but does not address the more important issue of NATO's role in today's security environment. My contention is that while the Prague initiatives are excellent, assuming they can be implemented, they will be meaningless unless the member states address the strategic future of the alliance in the 21st century, and its role in the global war on terrorism. The author surveyed studies and papers from think tanks and from NATO and EU, attended numerous panel discussions with subject experts, and questioned NATO, EU and US representatives and military leaders.